Last week, fourteen groups filed a public comment asking the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), to disclose Medicare payments to providers. Should the recommendation be implemented, it will add more transparency for health care costs to a system that needs it.

“We urge CMS to uphold its stated commitment to transparency and adopt a policy to promptly disclose, in an open format, payment data, with as much detail as practicable while protecting patient privacy,” recommended the organizations.

The public has a fundamental right to know how government spends public funds. Medicare’s tremendous size and impact – $555 billion in expenditures, covering 49 million beneficiaries – make it a prime target for increased transparency. In fact, just the improper payments from Medicare are estimated at a whopping $44 billion – which is more than the entire budget for the Justice Department.

Releasing payment data would allow members of the public, including journalists and watchdogs, to help detect fraud or improper payments. That increased scrutiny could deter fraudsters– as happened with spending under the 2009 Recovery Act. This in turn could strengthen Medicare and help ensure its ability to continue playing its vital role in securing health care for America’s seniors.

The signatories to the public comment are a roll call of good government advocates, journalism organizations, think tanks and media outlets in the United States, demonstrating widespread interest in the data and a hint of the organizations that stand ready to make use of it.

Such a data release has a recent precedent: in May, the United States Department of Health and Human Services released open data that compares the billing for the 100 most common treatments and procedures performed at more than 3000 hospital in the U.S. No patient privacy violations related to this release have been reported or demonstrated to date.

Should CMS choose to publish Medicare payments to providers, it would make 2013 a watershed year for increased data-driven transparency into health care costs.

As more and more people become connected using social media, researchers, media and public health officials naturally are increasingly interested in what their updates can tell us about the world. According to the Pew Internet and Life Project, 18% of American adults online are on Twitter with some 200 million active users globally sending out 400 million tweets every day. That amount of data is catnip for researchers interested in everything from sentiment analysis, food security or embryonic pandemics.

When people are sharing what they’re seeing using social media, city managers and public health agencies have increasingly learned to listen to what’s happening in the hopes of responding to fires, floods, odd smells, tornados, crimes or other public emergencies more effectively.

Some of the reported results are genuinely exciting, too: according to David Kirkpatrick, the director of UN Global Pulse, Twitter data accurately predicted the cholera outbreak in Haiti two weeks earlier than official records. Kirkpatrick’s team is now examining the predictive value of millions of tweets sent in Jakarta, Indonesia for assessing food security.

The perils of polling Twitter are particularly worth noting for media, as New York Times interactive developer Jacob Harris demonstrated this July.

That said, there are an increasing number of projects that are exploring the potential of Twitter for socially networked transparency. In Chicago, health authorities are seeking out Chicagoans who tweet about feeling poorly and ask them to share the restaurants they ate in most recently. Chicago’s health department told the Chicago Tribune that 150 Chicagoans have been contacted since the “Foodborne Chicago” initiative began, triggering 33 restaurant inspections in the first month, some of which found health code violations.

This kind of “high touch, high engagement” human approach requires a lot of humans, however, whose time is hard to scale over an entire city.

Further to the east, a research group at the University of Rochester analyzed millions of tweets in New York City to develop a system to monitor food-poisoning outbreaks at restaurants. The research crunched 3.8 million tweets, traced 23,000 restaurant visitors and found 480 reports of likely food poisoning.

As Henry Kautz highlighted in his column on public health and social data in the New York Times, there’s considerable interest in what can be gleaned from what people are sharing online:

“Groups at Brigham Young University and the University of Iowa have done extensive work on influenza monitoring via Twitter posts. Researchers at Microsoft are helping to identify women who are at risk of severe postpartum depression by analyzing changes in their online behavior. And researchers at Cornell are mining the social media stream to gather data for urban planning and environmental conservation.”

As always, anyone making public policy decisions based upon such data will have to take into account who is represented in the data or who is not.

That’s also true in efforts like Lungisa in South Africa, too, where a project is encouraging residents to hold government accountable using Twitter and Facebook. The issues raised on social media reflect the needs of the connected, not necessarily those of the poor, or of the powerful, who have their own channels to influence policy.

We’re looking for more examples of socially networked transparency, so please keep them coming. There’s already some rich veins for inquiry that some digging is turning up. For instance, in the most recent installment of his “week in civic innovation,” David Sasaki shared two helpful resources, which in turn have many more links to various projects and initiatives: